Profile: Nancy Schreiber, ASC,
Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows
By Bob Fisher

Originally Published in the October 2000 Issue of INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL MAGAZINE

Nancy Schreiber, ASC was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan where her mother was an art dealer. Although her father died when she was young, Schreiber remembers seeing a picture of her parents with her father holding a 16 mm camera. It made an indelible impression and maybe presaged her destiny. Schreiber graduated from the University of Michigan where she studied psychology and the history of art.

She replied to an ad that led to a $50 a week job as a production assistant on a modest budget film shot in New York. By the end of the film, Schreiber was the best boy on the electrical crew. A year later, she was the gaffer for co-directors Shirley MacLaine and Claudia Weill on an historic documentary, The Other Half of the Sky: A China Memoir.

Schreiber was the first woman gaffer in New York's NABET guild. Later, she joined the camera Guild as a director of photography. Her breakthrough came with the PBS documentary series Middletown and with her own award winning film Possum Living. She has subsequently compiled an eclectic list of documentary, TV commercial, music videos and narrative credits including Neil LaBute's Your Friends and Neighbors. Schreiber has three features slated for release in late 2000, including Buying the Cow-a comedy for Destination Films; Shadow Magic-a period film directed in China by Ann Hui that Sony Classics picked up at Sundance Festival; and Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows for Artisan Entertainment.

Artisan chose Joe Berlinger, a cutting edge documentary director, to bring the sequel to the screen. "I had worked with Joe and his partner Bruce Sinofsky on commercials and the documentary Revelations, Paradise Lost Revisited which was just nominated for an Emmy. I was a fan of their other documentary and had met them both years earlier at the legendary Maysles Films where they got their start. Joe is a great storyteller with sharp visual sensibilities. Everybody assumed we'd do a lot of shaky camera work with the mini-digital camcorder, but they're going to be surprised."

All of the main characters are played by young actors fresh out of New York. The film opens in the forest as audiences might expect, but later unfolds in a two-story abandoned warehouse where one of the characters lives and works.

Schreiber came aboard the end of last January while Berlinger was still remolding the script. They immediately began scouting in the Baltimore area not far from the location of the first film. They found a warehouse that they partially converted to a sound stage. It had a high enough ceiling to build a second story for the workroom where the character Jeff Donovan edits his home videos.

"For a short time we considered the possibility of shooting in super 16 but later decided 35mm was the appropriate format," Schreiber says. "We considered the small digital format for the video portions that one of our characters occasionally uses.

"I'm not a technology snob," she says, "but I felt the image quality wasn't there yet for the kind of story we wanted to tell. I used DV Cam on a wonderful Vietnamese documentary titled, Breathe In Breathe Out. I thought it looked good when shot in decent light but was less than wonderful in low light. On Blair Witch 2, we weren't going to have time to re-light for video cameras, so I opted to use DigiBeta instead.

"I wanted a relatively clean video image, figuring I could degrade it later if we wanted the footage to look more homespun," she says. "I decided to shoot in both 4x3 and 16x9 DigiBeta format. We shot a lot of the video off the monitor of the loft's editing system. It has a great look with the scan lines of the video monitor. I also used the video camera to shoot a fair amount of a campfire scene. I set the camera menu to desaturate colors and reduce contrast, so it had a flatter, monochromatic look. When you add orange from the campfire and the coolness of the moonlight, it looks great for video."

Production began in mid March and wrapped at the beginning of May. Schreiber used a lightweight Aaton 35 camera when they were shooting film in the woods for Steadicam and handheld work. Her main camera was a Panaflex Millennium with Primo 11:1 and 4:1 zoom lenses, and a few primes, ranging from a 100 mm lens for close-ups to 10 and 14 mm lenses for the widest shots.

"We used the Steadicam in unconventional ways," she says. "It doesn't float but is much more dynamic. As the action gets more intense the camera is more in your face, with more handheld work and wider lenses."

The warehouse was about 200-feet long with a workspace set about eight-feet above the floor. Schreiber hid lights in niches and used practicals that looked like part of the set. Production designer Vincent Peranio gave Schreiber funky little track lights that were painted a rusty color so they looked old. She and key grip Sean Crowell built a grid for small tungsten lights, which they painted black so it faded into the background.

The windows in the loft were about 50-feet high. There was a creek outside the building that made it difficult and expensive to light through the windows. But most of the warehouse scenes were night, so Schreiber tented the windows to block exterior light. She and camera operator Scott Sakamoto used a Technocrane for shots in the workspace loft that demanded a fluid look. They built a platform for the crane out of steel deck and ran 64 feet long and was six feet in the air.

"That allowed us to moving shots at eye level," she says. "The warehouse had structural beams which limited our moves, but building had so much character I was glad we found a practical location to give the film a different kind of authenticity."

Schreiber used Kodak Vision 500T film for night exteriors and in the loft, the Vision 250D film for day interiors and late afternoon exteriors, the Eastman EXR 100T film for brighter exteriors.

It looks and feels spontaneous but don't let that fool you. Berlinger rehearsed the cast religiously, and the words in the script were sacrosanct.

"We wanted to take the audience on a ride without hitting them over the head, with obtrusive style. " Schreiber explains. "As the story progresses, the images become moodier. The color of light becomes cooler. The camera movement becomes smoother. The shadows get a little heavier and we used wider angle lenses.

We also invite the audience to get deeper into the characters' heads with tighter and more claustrophobic close-ups, from lips to eyes at the end. Just a dab of eyelight can reveal what they're thinking or a shadow can conceal it. I also tended to use less diffusion on the lenses as well as the lights as the story progressed."

Those are among some of the technical decisions that enable cinematographers such as Schreiber to take a painterly approach to visual storytelling.